Best of 2012: Is there a future for Christianity?

Ross DouthatABC Religion and Ethics
4 Jan 2013

It would be heresy to assume that a Christian renaissance is inevitable. Christianity's resilience hasn't prevented particular Christendoms from decaying. But to hope is every believer's obligation.
Credit: Getty Images

The story of Christianity has always featured unexpected resurrections. Eras of corruption give way to eras of reform; sinners and cynics cede the floor to a rush of idealists and saints; political and intellectual challenges emerge and then are gradually surmounted.

There is no single form of Christian civilization, in the same sense that there is no stereotypical Christian life; across two millennia, the faith has found ways to make itself at home in the Roman court and the medieval monastery, the Renaissance city and the American suburb alike.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton describes what he calls the "five deaths of the faith" - the moments in Western history when Christianity seemed doomed to either perish entirely or else fade to the margins of a post-Christian civilization.

It would have been natural for the faith to decline and fall with the Roman Empire, or to disappear gradually after the armies of Islam conquered its ancient heartland in the Near East and North Africa was conquered by the armies of Islam. It would have been predictable if Christianity had dissolved along with feudalism when the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, or if it had vanished with the anciens regimes of Europe amid the turmoil of the age of revolutions. And it would have been completely understandable if the faith had gradually waned away during the long nineteenth century, when it was dismissed by Marx, challenged by Darwin, denounced by Nietzsche, and explained away by Freud.

But in each of these cases, an age of crisis was swiftly followed by an era of renewal, in which forces threatening the faith either receded or were discredited and Christianity itself revived. Time and again, Chesterton noted, "the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs." But each time, "it was the dog that died."

It would be heresy and hubris to assume that renewal is inevitable. Christianity's overall resilience hasn't prevented particular Christendoms from decaying and dissolving. But to hope for a revival is every believer's obligation.

"For us, there is only the trying," T.S. Eliot wrote. "The rest is not our business." The deeper trends that might inspire a Christian renaissance are beyond any individual believer's control. But the kind of faith that should animate such a renaissance can be lived out Christian by Christian, congregation by congregation, day by day, without regard to whether it succeeds in changing the American way of religion as a whole. Would should such a renewed Christianity look like?

First, such a faith should be political without being partisan. This means avoiding the perennial nationalist temptation without falling prey to quietism or indifference. The fact that there is no single model for a Christian politics, no uniquely godly leaders or nations or parties, doesn't absolve Christian citizens of the obligation to bring their faith to bear on debates about justice and the common good. Instead, it sharpens every Christian's obligation to be a model unto themselves - to make it clear, in words and deeds, how their faith informs their voting and their activism, and to constantly test their ideological convictions against their theological worldview.

When believers practice politics, there should be a clear Christian difference - an allegiance to principle over party that sets the Christian voter and the Christian politician apart from the typical Republican or Democrat. This difference should begin with the rule that Jesus gave his followers: "First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Christians can disagree about public policy in good faith, and a libertarian and a social democrat can both claim to be living out the gospel. But the Christian libertarian has a particular obligation to recognize those places where libertarianism's emphasis on freedom can shade into an un-Christian worship of the individual. Likewise the Christian liberal: even as he supports government interventions to assist the poor and dispossessed, he should be constantly on guard against the tendency to deify Leviathan, and wary of the ways that government power can easily be turned to inhuman and immoral ends.

In the contemporary United States, a host of factors - from the salience of issues like abortion to the anti-Christian biases of our largely left-wing intelligentsia - ensure that many orthodox Christians feel more comfortable affiliating with the Republican Party than with the Democrats. But this comfort should not blind Christians to the GOP's flaws. Instead, they should be the Republican Party's most vocal internal critics, constantly looking for places where the right-wing party line deserves correction, and constantly aware that Rush Limbaugh's take on tax policy and Donald Rumsfeld's views on waterboarding are not inscribed in the New Testament.

Similarly, those Christians for whom the Democratic Party still seems to provide a more natural home should make it their business to speak out loudly against the ways that liberalism can provide a warrant for libertinism.

Our politics do not exactly overflow with examples of this kind of engagement. But there are bright spots here and there. One need not agree with the exact balance they've struck to admire the consistency with which the Catholic bishops have defied easy partisan categorization over the years, taking conservative positions on issues like abortion and gay marriage even as they tilt leftward on issues like immigration and health care.

In the Evangelical world, it's been encouraging to watch the new head of Focus on the Family, Jim Daly, try to reconnect with his organization's original mission as a pro-family advocacy group, emphasizing cultural forays like Tim Tebow's pro-life Super Bowl ad over the attempts at Republican Party kingmaking that consumed James Dobson's later years at the organization.

In the political arena itself, meanwhile, we are not that far removed from an era when America's leading Evangelical politician was the antiwar environmentalist Republican Mark Hatfield, and one of its leading Catholic officeholders was the pro-life Democrat Sargent Shriver. We are not so distant from the days when the civil rights movement united Christians from many different traditions in a cause that ultimately transcended party affiliations entirely.

We don't need to imagine what a Christian politics less corrupted by ideology and partisanship would look like. We only need to remember what was possible not all that long ago.

Second, a renewed Christianity should be ecumenical but also confessional. From the post-denominational appeals of Billy Graham and his megachurch-building heirs, to the "deeds not creeds" activism of Mainline Protestant accommodationists, to the culture war co-belligerency of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, the quest for greater Christian unity has been one of the defining projects of the modern era.

This vision must not be abandoned. But neither can ecumenism become the source and summit of the Christian life. "Parachurch" efforts and "emergent" communities cannot replace institutional churches. The common ground of a "mere Christianity" cannot be allowed to become a lowest common denominator. The political causes that often unite believers from different churches cannot be allowed to become more important than the gospel itself.

This has happened too often in contemporary Christianity. In their quest to woo the biggest possible audience, megachurch pastors have watered down Evangelical theology and ignored much of their own Reformation heritage. In the pursuit of relevance and dialogue, a large swath of post-Vatican II Catholicism has made itself liturgically and theologically indistinguishable from Mainline Protestantism.

In the pursuit of social change, both the accommodationist project of the 1960s and 70s and the resistance movement that followed have too often confused political and religious goals, and made elections and legislation an end unto themselves.

Here C.S. Lewis is worth heeding. The man who coined the term "mere Christianity" also warned against its misapplication and abuse:

"I hope no reader will suppose the "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions-as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in."

Similarly, believers who inhabit the various rooms can enter the hall for the sake of dialogue and mutual support. But they cannot afford to remain there, chatting and cooperating and maybe even throwing up some tents, while their own rooms fall into neglect. A conversation has to reach conclusions in order to actually stand for something; a community has to define itself theologically in order to be able to sustain itself across the generations.

In an age of institutional weakness and doctrinal drift, American Christianity has much more to gain from a robust Catholicism and a robust Calvinism that it does from even the most fruitful Catholic-Calvinist theological dialogue.

Third, a renewed Christianity should be moralistic but also holistic. No aspect of Christian faith is less appealing to contemporary sensibilities than the faith's long list of "thou shalt nots," and no prohibition attracts more exasperation and contempt than the Christian view of chastity and sex. But recurring efforts to downplay the faith's moralistic side - to make its commandments general rather than particular, to recontextualize Bible passages that offend contemporary sensibilities, to make the faith seem more hospitable to many millions of divorced people, cohabitating couples, and (especially) gays and lesbians - have usually ended up redefining Christianity entirely.

The traditional Christian view of sexuality is more essential to the faith as a whole than many modern believers want to acknowledge. Like most Christian dogmas, from the identity of Christ to the doctrine of the Trinity, it doesn't just rest on a literal reading of a few passages in Scripture, which can be easily revised or reinterpreted. Rather, it's the fruit of centuries' worth of meditation and argument on the whole of the biblical narrative, from the creation of Adam and Eve to Jesus's prohibition on divorce. It seems easy enough to snip a single thread out of this pattern, but often the whole thing swiftly unravels once you do.

Yet many conservative Christians often make a similar mistake; they emphasize the most hot-button (and easily politicized) moral issues while losing sight of the tapestry as a whole. There are seven deadly sins, not just one, and Christianity's understanding of marriage and chastity is intimately bound to its views on gluttony and avarice and pride. (Recall that in the Inferno, Dante consigns gluttons, misers and spendthrifts to lower circles of hell than adulterers and fornicators.)

Christians often complain, with some justice, that journalists only want to quote religious leaders when they're talking about sex. But sexual issues are one of the few places where many ministers and bishops are comfortable issuing specific condemnations, as opposed to general love-thy-neighbour appeals. It's rare to hear a strident Sunday sermon about the temptations of the five-course meal and the all-you-can-eat buffet, or to hear a high-profile pastor who addresses the sin of greed in the frank manner of, say, Saint Basil the Great in the fourth century AD:

"The bread that you possess belongs to the hungry. The clothes that you store in boxes, belong to the naked. The shoes rotting by you, belong to the bare-foot. The money that you hide belongs to anyone in need. You wrong as many people as you could help."

Note that Basil isn't arguing for a slightly higher marginal tax rate to fund modest improvements in public services. He's passing judgment on individual sins, and calling for individual repentance. There are conservative Christians today who seem terrified of even remotely criticizing Wall Street tycoons and high-finance buccaneers, lest such criticism be interpreted as an endorsement of the Democratic Party's political agenda. But a Christianity that cannot use the language of Basil - and of Jesus - to attack the cult of Mammon will inevitably be less persuasive when the time comes to attack the cult of Dionysus.

In much the same way, the Christian case for fidelity and chastity will inevitably seem partial and hypocritical if it trains most of its attention on the minority of cases - on homosexual wedlock and the slippery slope to polygamy beyond. It is the heterosexual divorce rate, the heterosexual retreat from marriage and the heterosexual out-of-wedlock birthrate that should command the most attention from Christian moralists.

The Christian perspective on gay sex only makes sense in light of the Christian perspective on straight sex, and in a culture that has made heterosexual desire the measure of all things, asking gays alone to conform their lives to a hard teaching will inevitably seem like a form of bigotry.

Obviously the Christian position on homosexuality will be widely described as bigotry in any event. I have no easy answers to the question of how churches should minister to gays and lesbians in a post-closet age, and great sympathy for same-sex-attracted Christians who regard the traditional teaching as impossible. But it's worth emphasizing that one reason the Christian insistence on chastity for homosexuals seems particularly cruel and unreasonable is that the Christian churches no longer successfully hold up heterosexual chastity as a clearly defined, successfully lived out ideal.

The prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood, for instance, has become a source of corruption and scandal, not because gay men can't be holy priests (they can) but because without a large enough straight presence in seminaries and rectories the ideal of a "celibate" priesthood inevitably comes to feel like a kind of richly brocaded closet for gay Catholics rather than a genuine way of life.

Too often, contemporary Christian treatments of sexuality make the idea of chastity seem like a kind of divine punishment, whether for a failed marriage or an unchosen sexual orientation. This concept would have been entirely foreign to earlier eras of Christian history, which valourized celibacy as the highest and holiest of callings, and elevated various forms of committed friendship and nonfamilial community as viable alternatives to Christian marriage - equal in dignity, and perhaps superior in holiness.

From the early Church to the Victorian era, rituals and gestures grew up to exalt and commemorate chaste same-sex affection, and forms of communal life were made available to unmarried Christians who didn't feel called to take monastic vows. When the historian John Boswell argued that medieval Christianity conducted same-sex weddings, he was clearly mistaken about the nature of the ceremonies, but he wasn't wrong about the existence of a Christian culture that, as Andrew Sullivan puts it, "taught the primacy of caritas to eros, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love."

Elements of this culture survive, primarily in Catholicism. (In both its Mainline and Evangelical forms, Protestantism has had difficulty advancing positive models for celibate life.) But to a great extent, the understandable Christian zeal to defend the institution of marriage has created a vacuum where the case for chaste modes of living should exist. It isn't a coincidence that some of the most eloquent celebrations of the ancient emphasis on friendship and community have come from gay and lesbian Christians - from writers like Sullivan, who dissents from the traditional teaching on gay marriage, but also from writers who accept it, such as the Catholic Eve Tushnet and the Evangelical Wesley Hill.

Recovering this older strain of Christian thought would be only a partial answer to the issue of homosexuality, but it seems like a more plausible response than either the complete abandonment of the Christian view of marriage or the blinkered quest for psychiatric "cures" (itself a Christian surrender to the cult of therapy).

A renewed emphasis on nonmarital forms of community could have broader applications as well. With the eclipse of the nuclear family, we increasingly inhabit a culture of singletons and divorc, unwed parents and unmarried retirees, in which millions upon millions of people pass through life without the stability of a two-parent family and then find themselves growing old alone. There is a void here, in other words, that a more holistic Christianity should find ways to fill - rediscovering the resources of the Christian past to address the needs of the American present.

Finally, a renewed Christianity should be oriented toward sanctity and beauty. In every crisis in the Christian past, it has been saints and artists - from Saint Francis down to John Wesley, Dante to Dostoevsky - who resurrected the faith from one of its many deaths. The example of a single extraordinary woman, Mother Teresa, did more for Christian witness in the twentieth century than every theology department and political action committee put together.

The critic Alan Jacobs points out that remains of highbrow Christian culture in the United States is sustained, to a remarkable extent, by literary works rather than by institutions - by Wise Blood and Walker Percy, Auden's verse and The Chronicles of Narnia, Thomas Merton's memoirs and "The Four Quartets." As Joseph Ratzinger put it, shortly before becoming Benedict XVI:

"The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb."

Today we have too few of both. True, there are some high-profile Christian artists - the novelist Marilynne Robinson, the poet (and editor of Poetry magazine) Christian Wiman, even the demon-haunted Mel Gibson - but nothing that even resembles a significant Christian presence in literature and architecture, television and film.

The ghost of a Christian worldview haunts many of our finest creative minds, from David Chase to Terence Malick, but the kind of belief that infused the mid-century Christian renaissance is much harder to find. Worse, many Christians are either indifferent to beauty or suspicious of its snares, content to worship in tacky churches and amuse themselves with cultural products that are well-meaning but distinctly second-rate. Few Americans think of religion as a great wellspring of aesthetic achievement anymore, and the Christian message is vastly weaker for it.

As for saints, there are no doubt many holy men and women in America whose sanctity is known to God alone. But Christian witness needs to be public and evangelistic as well as intimate and personal, and our highest-profile evangelists - Catholic as well as Protestant - have been far more likely to fall prey to the culture of celebrity than to follow in the footsteps of a Jonathan Edwards or a Dorothy Day.

The future of American religion depends on believers who can demonstrate, in word and deed alike, that the possibilities of the Christian life are not exhausted by TV preachers and self-help gurus, utopians and demagogues. It depends on public examples of holiness, and public demonstrations of what the imitation of Christ can mean for a fallen world. We are waiting, not for another political saviour or television personality but for a Dominic or a Francis, an Ignatius or a Wesley, a Wilberforce or a Newman, a Bonhoeffer or a Solzhenitsyn.

Only sanctity can justify Christianity's existence; only sanctity can make the case for faith; only sanctity, or the hope thereof, can ultimately redeem the world.

***

In my book Bad Religion, I often tried to make a more instrumental case for Christian orthodoxy - defending its exacting moralism as a curb against worldly excess and corruption, praising its paradoxes and mysteries for respecting the complexities of human affairs in ways that more streamlined theologies do not, celebrating the role of its institutions in assimilating immigrants, sustaining families, and forging strong communities. My hope was to persuade even the most sceptical reader that traditional Christian faith might have more to offer than either its flawed defenders or its fashionable enemies would lead one to believe.

But neither religions nor cultures can live on instrumentality alone. To make any difference in our common life, Christianity must be lived - not as a means to social cohesion or national renewal, but as an end unto itself.

Anyone who seeks a more perfect union should begin by seeking the perfection of their own soul. Anyone who would save their country should first look to save themselves. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added to you."

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Comments (5)

Gavin :

11 Jan 2013 11:58:52am

You make the following statement as if it's a mystery:

"Too often, contemporary Christian treatments of sexuality make the idea of chastity seem like a kind of divine punishment, whether for a failed marriage or an unchosen sexual orientation. This concept would have been entirely foreign to earlier eras of Christian history."

But the difference between 'earlier eras' and now is the pill. It is in light of this technology that chastity starts to look like punishment. People have always wanted to have sex but the reasons not to were more compelling before the pill.

If Christianity keeps preaching to a byegone era where technologies such as the pill didn't exist, it will die the death of irrelevancy.

Col Nelson :

09 Jan 2013 11:26:32am

I admire Ross Douthat's attempt to reinvigorate the best of the Christian life. However the attempt also demonstrates that Christian morality is mired to ancient texts and dogmas. As such it will always struggle with relevancy because there is no scope to allow new findings to enrich old views. Contrast this with a morality that, based in the nature of rational people, is able to provide a rich basis to continually develop ways to increase human wellbeing.

David Miller, Atheist Society :

We Atheists are often easily able to criticise Christianity due to its being such a mixture of diverse elements. The number of divergent streams out of which Christianity is constructed is amazing.

And yet, it is those very inconsistencies and contradictions, within Christianity and its texts, that has given it its staying power. As an Atheist I nevertheless have to admit that Christianity has been able to therefore successfully adapt to almost every type of civilisation that has arisen.

Surprisingly, in most of the developed countries, main-stream Christianity is in obvious decline. The reason for its demise is still an open question.

B Ryan :

06 Jan 2013 3:33:13am

There is only ONE Chrisitanity that has any merit whatsoever. The total and aboslute belief that Jesus is the Risen Lord the Son of the Almighty GOD, creator of the Universe. HIS Holy Bible has the last and only valid word for the life of the true Christian. No deviation allowed.

Politically Incorrect :

09 Jan 2013 4:12:18pm

Yet Christianity has never been one of consensus, even Paul acknowledged in the early days of Christianity that the Church was a lose collection of different sects that believed different things. He was trying to unify it under his own brand but no consensus came about until an official church was established under Constantine the Great.

Some believed in the Doctorine of the Trinity, others rejected it assuming Jesus and Yahweh were seperate yet devine father and son (some denominations still reject the Trinity)

Some even believed Yahweh to be an evil god of the physical and the flesh while Jesus portrayed a good god of the spirit. Similar to the father/son rivalry where the good son Zeus overthrew his evil father Chronos.

There were 30 different Gospels that said different things. Some for instance had Jesus showing disregard for the Torah and talking to Gentiles, while others he said those who erase the law will burn and refered to non-Jews as 'dogs'.

There were even those that believed Jesus was never a flesh and blood human being but a pure spirit crufified and resurected in a spiritual realm as opposed to on Earth.

Some believed the Gospels to be literal, most allegorical subject to interpretation while the Gnostics had a concept of "secret knowledge" that was simply far different conclusions to those who read it literally or as a symbolic message.

THAT was how diverse the Christian religion was in its earliest days which one would assume was taught by the Apostles that either recently lived or were still alive and yet it was all Christianity

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